Though knowing what reconstructionism means in Christian contexts, I could just imagine a culture where nobody gets anything done because everyone is trying to figure out why the person said "could you hand me the salt" instead of "please pass the salt":-)
Well then the environment around him has changed, moving his views further towards the extreme without consulting him. I still place him not quite as far out as Your Average Fscking Script Kiddie (the equivalent of enviro-terrorists or Al-Qaeda in my book).
Ideals have the problem that people agree with them in part, but if implemented they'd be a disaster (religious fundamentalism being the biggest example of that point). The world Stallman wants puts principle above practice; while Open Source is a great thing, it is simply meaningless in certain markets, and improperly applied it can cripple some markets (particularly gaming, where developers may want to give away the engine but have a vested interest in hiding the data files). There are complex issues involving scarcity, consumer value, and security that haven't all been fully resolved, and Stallman will not be one of those involved in the resolution.
As for calling him a communist... I wasn't aware that communism had a monopoly on far-left dogmatism. Radical separatist [feminism|ethnocentrism] and Derridean reconstructionism are both left extremisms that need have little or nothing to do with communism (not that they don't coincide in certain individuals, but that's not the point). Though I will point out that force is nevertheless an issue; RMS is every bit as arrogant about the matter as Bill Gates is, and the GPL does require a certain code of conduct. RMS would seem to be a left-libertarian to my mind, and even if I'm on the wrong end of the left-right thing (they do seem to wrap around at the back, somewhere in an ugly swamp of dogma) I don't think it's unfair to say he's extreme whatever he is.
I do agree with your point on Microsoft, though... well put...
/Brian
Politicking oneself into obscurity
on
The Stallman Factor
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· Score: 5, Insightful
About two years ago I made a/. post about Stallman's tactics that says a lot about this. The fact is that Stallman seems always to have been on the very edge of respectability, and since the rise to power of Linux he's slipped pretty much totally into the lunatic fringe.
Philosophically, Stallman is as far on the extreme left of the software world as PETA is in animal rights or the CP-USA is in politics. While not outright advocating total software anarchy now, he certainly wouldn't object to the idea if it happened. The problem is that while I somewhat understand his desire for credit for GNU, he's gone about it the wrong way, attempting to coopt an essentially non-political project (at least to its creator) for his own agenda.
Like it or not, Linus ain't in it for the politics; that's just a collateral benefit of having a free, high-quality kernel. Stallman is just another extremist with a useful ideal but no practical value.
Hmmm... checking the lineage
it's not as clear as that. I had been under the impression that OSF was more or less BSDish, but with a heavy mix of SysV. The chart only shows it as being a hybrid (the perils of trying to explain everything with a family tree, I suppose).
Okay, I'm looking around the Open Group's site... do they even make OSF/1 available anymore (as if it was really necessary)?/Brian
I own a VL series 7 (P2/333) and I have to say it is pretty interesting to work with. The design is upside down and backwards compared to an ATX, and it's sorta kinda NLX-like (the power supply connectors are different, though).
I can see why it might appeal to people, honestly; that's one of the niceties of the NLX-type design. Truthfully, I mostly bought it because it was the best thing available that day at the MIT flea, and I wouldn't recommend it to a serious PC user (I am a Mac user who was in search of a good Linux box that day). I would have liked to see HP use this design in some of their home systems; it would make working inside those beasties dramatically easier (especially on those older microtower Pavilion models that crammed a full-ATX board into a box the size of a large shoebox).
I will say this, though: if the Robo-Pavilion case I've been seeing at Best Buy is the future of HP cases, it's a good thing that Compaq got its industrial design groove with the latest generation of Presarios. If you're going to sell half-assed schlock systems for $1200 a pop, at least make sure you put it in a pretty package, because it's not going to sell on the technical merits...
You're correct on the names, but OSF/1 was a later branch off the BSD tree than Ultrix. OSF/1 was a Mach-based hybrid between BSD and SysV that never really took off; the only shipping system based on it was Tru64, though IBM did consider moving AIX to it. There was a rumor that Apple considered doing the same thing to A/UX, and PowerOpen (what was to be the native Unix on PowerPC, long before Linux and Rhapsody) was to be OSF/1-based.
Of course, none of them made it to market. And OSF/1 is now dead and buried. Oh well.
So let's see. We have a worm. It's infected with a virus. Double your damage, double your fun... reminds me a little of flesh-eating streptococcus. Regular strep, you get a sore throat and a week or so of penicillin. Give that strep a virus, suddenly your arm starts melting.
Now what I want to know: is this train wreck a coincidence or has someone been cross-breeding?
I just heard the sad news on IRC. Poster Anonymous Coward from Slashdot fame was found dead in his home this morning under a pile of BSD CDs and Stephen King books. I am sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his role as the vector for half-witted trolls and idiotic Beowulf and First Post posts, there's no denying his contribution to the communal bowl of hot grits. Truly a (naked and petrified)/. icon.
Well, I can sort of see why nobody uses it -- it looks interesting, but really strange and a long way from finished. The crufted-together development process reminds me uncomfortably of the strange beast that is Inform (www.gnelson.demon.co.uk/inform), and it really looks like it's a long way away from being ready to go.
-Apple's internal stuff hadn't lost credibility; we were going crazy waiting for Copland (which died of a very painful case of runaway second-system effect). -Rhapsody did ship, as OS X Server. The only problem was that it was realized during the development process that not giving developers an easy way to convert Classic apps to OS X was Not A Good Idea, and the consumer release had to be delayed to create Carbon. Somewhere in there Gil Amelio got bounced and Steve Jobs reclaimed full control. -Tru64 Unix is Mach-based as well. More to the point, Solaris is Unix-branded, and though Linux isn't Dennis Ritchie considers it part of the family. By that standard, if it quacks like a duck... -The mention of Linux userfriendliness is, to put it charitably, anachronistic in the context you're talking about.
Your understanding of history is faulty, your understanding of the present is not much better, and the only intelligent thing in your entire post is describing Microsoft's sales tactics as "slamming".
(Well, that and I find the term Macastrati a hysterically funny term for people who have come over to the Mac side because of Eunuchs^h^h^h^h^h^h^hUnix, though I'll leave it up to them of the world if they wish to accept it...)
Uh-huh. Last time I checked the US was more likely to shoot first than the Soviet Union.
Look. The simple fact is that we went into Panama to get rid of a corrupt dictator that just happened to be sitting on a waterway that controlled an insane amount of traffic; we spent all that money and arrested him on possession of tamale dough with intent to distribute. Grenada was a complete sham, and then there was El Salvador, and the mess in Nicaragua...
I return to my original point that the Reagan administration would have already moved troops into Venezuela under false pretenses very like the fall of the Mussadiq regime in Iran. Chavez -- a democratically elected president -- would have been labeled a Communist sympathizer in the press, and we'd have used that as an excuse to invade. Of course, we've got the less-than-effective war on terrorism going on (lotsa fighting, not much addressing the original cause of the terrorism) and it really doesn't look good to be supporting undemocratic governments.
As for stirring up internal unrest -- I think we did that to them, making you look like a McCarthyist goon. Not to mention a troll, as you're posting out your ass as an AC.
Anyway, I don't see a problem here. I would be rather curious as to how this whole thing started, as NANAE is not on my list of regular Usenet reading. But it is good that a spammer can't force an ISP to waste bandwidth on them.
Smart move on Peru's part -- if this law passes they seem to have given some real thought to the repercussions of it.
Nice to see the Third World realizing they can take some initiative without asking "Uncle May I". Venezuela and Yugoslavia too -- their governments don't really like us much, but they're democratically elected, and Chavez in Venezuela has even come back from a possibly White House-backed (or at the very least consented) coup attempt. (He must be happy it's not 1985 -- if it was we'd already be down there with troops to "go after the Commies"...)
I think the cleanest way to think of it is as NextStep 7.1.4. Before that, the original OS X Server (Rhapsody, to the Mac-clued) would have been 6, before that the unreleased NeXTStep 5 that would have been the next release from NeXT had they not been bought out (which most people only know from their window manager), and before that NeXTStep 4 that was the last production version under the NeXTStep name and which was what MS ripped of for the Win95 interface.
As Jordan Hubbard becomes more and more a MacOS X posession, I just imagine Hexley vs. Beastie in a Celebrity Deathmatch.
It is sort of sad to see something like that happen, though. One could assume it was inevitable, though I suppose that would be hard without knowing what exactly he does at Apple.
Down at the Cupertino speedway, the big Mac showdown! See the coolest laptop in the business get even cooler! See the amazing Unix Mac, now better than ever! See the mind-boggling G4 power of the computer everyone thinks is a text editor!
We'll sell you the entire cupholder, but you'll only need...
At a point, though, they took out the monitor, slapped a G4 into it, and coughed up the Cube. So they did ship before; they just changed it beyond recognition. The eMac is the second go-round.
Molar Mac?! ROTFLMAO! I've never heard that one before (probably because they were so rare).
You're right, of course -- the eMachines sub-uATX boxes are probably some of the ugliest, not to mention one particular generation of Presario microtowers from Compaq. Apple has had a few major league clunkers, though -- the worst would probably be the Quadra 8xx/PM8x00/PM9500 case, though. I bought one a while back (my current #2 Mac, in use because my #1 is out of commission) for a third of the price because it was basically in kit form, and the internal arrangement of that system is beyond ludicrous.
Plastic chassis (not that big a deal, but it looks real strange next to a good PC case). The upper drive bay (where the CD-ROM goes) isn't so much a bay as a platform. You have to remove the motherboard to install memory, a process very like major surgery. I don't know why it took Apple until the 8600/9600 to bring the fliptop design to their tower boxes. On top of that, getting the case back into place after removing it is an absurd precision operation.
That and Apple has a habit of phoning it in design-wise on their limited-market machines. Look at a) the Tanzania-based 4400/7220, b) Artemis (the iMac's immediate all-in-one predecessor, and c) the eMate. The eMate is the only one that could be considered attractive; Artemis in particular was kinda scary-looking...
/Brian
Re:Speak 'n' Spell emulation?
on
PDAs For Kids
·
· Score: 2
What's bugging me...
Why did they not rerelease the Speak'n'Spell to coincide with E.T. being rereleased? It'd be pretty cheap (they could make it half as thick, on one chip), it would sell like crazy, and it would take one's mind off the fact that it is currently a little dicey to continue having dirty thoughts about Drew Barrymore.
/Brian
Not the coolest ever from FP, though..
on
PDAs For Kids
·
· Score: 2
I want my Pixelvision.
My childhood best friend and I both owned PXL-2000 camcorders. I'd rather have one of those than one of these; the Pixelvision was easily the coolest toy Fisher-Price ever cooked up, and it's rather a shame they didn't last very long. We all used to think we were TV producers back in the day -- parodies of Star Trek and 20/20 were the big thing.
I had an anti-Microsoft attitude long before that, believe me.
Microsoft is shaping up to be just another obliviously greedy multinational, not that that's any big surprise. Smart of someone to be looking to head this mess off.
Incidentally... somehow a side note on Venezuela seems relevant... okay, Hugo Chavez will make me pay higher prices at the gas pump, but somehow I don't really have a problem with that. I mean, how often has a Latin American coup failed so utterly?
CompUSA sells one that works like a Mac case but looks like an HP. It's made by FMI (I have no idea who that is). I've thought of buying one, but I'm ambivalent about the quality.
Go to compusa.com and look for FMI 300-watt screwless. It's about $60 online.
Slashdot Mirror
whoops, s/reconstructionism/deconstructionism
:-)
Though knowing what reconstructionism means in Christian contexts, I could just imagine a culture where nobody gets anything done because everyone is trying to figure out why the person said "could you hand me the salt" instead of "please pass the salt"
/Brian
Well then the environment around him has changed, moving his views further towards the extreme without consulting him. I still place him not quite as far out as Your Average Fscking Script Kiddie (the equivalent of enviro-terrorists or Al-Qaeda in my book).
Ideals have the problem that people agree with them in part, but if implemented they'd be a disaster (religious fundamentalism being the biggest example of that point). The world Stallman wants puts principle above practice; while Open Source is a great thing, it is simply meaningless in certain markets, and improperly applied it can cripple some markets (particularly gaming, where developers may want to give away the engine but have a vested interest in hiding the data files). There are complex issues involving scarcity, consumer value, and security that haven't all been fully resolved, and Stallman will not be one of those involved in the resolution.
As for calling him a communist... I wasn't aware that communism had a monopoly on far-left dogmatism. Radical separatist [feminism|ethnocentrism] and Derridean reconstructionism are both left extremisms that need have little or nothing to do with communism (not that they don't coincide in certain individuals, but that's not the point). Though I will point out that force is nevertheless an issue; RMS is every bit as arrogant about the matter as Bill Gates is, and the GPL does require a certain code of conduct. RMS would seem to be a left-libertarian to my mind, and even if I'm on the wrong end of the left-right thing (they do seem to wrap around at the back, somewhere in an ugly swamp of dogma) I don't think it's unfair to say he's extreme whatever he is.
I do agree with your point on Microsoft, though... well put...
/Brian
Philosophically, Stallman is as far on the extreme left of the software world as PETA is in animal rights or the CP-USA is in politics. While not outright advocating total software anarchy now, he certainly wouldn't object to the idea if it happened. The problem is that while I somewhat understand his desire for credit for GNU, he's gone about it the wrong way, attempting to coopt an essentially non-political project (at least to its creator) for his own agenda.
Like it or not, Linus ain't in it for the politics; that's just a collateral benefit of having a free, high-quality kernel. Stallman is just another extremist with a useful ideal but no practical value.
Okay, I'm looking around the Open Group's site... do they even make OSF/1 available anymore (as if it was really necessary)? /Brian
I own a VL series 7 (P2/333) and I have to say it is pretty interesting to work with. The design is upside down and backwards compared to an ATX, and it's sorta kinda NLX-like (the power supply connectors are different, though).
I can see why it might appeal to people, honestly; that's one of the niceties of the NLX-type design. Truthfully, I mostly bought it because it was the best thing available that day at the MIT flea, and I wouldn't recommend it to a serious PC user (I am a Mac user who was in search of a good Linux box that day). I would have liked to see HP use this design in some of their home systems; it would make working inside those beasties dramatically easier (especially on those older microtower Pavilion models that crammed a full-ATX board into a box the size of a large shoebox).
I will say this, though: if the Robo-Pavilion case I've been seeing at Best Buy is the future of HP cases, it's a good thing that Compaq got its industrial design groove with the latest generation of Presarios. If you're going to sell half-assed schlock systems for $1200 a pop, at least make sure you put it in a pretty package, because it's not going to sell on the technical merits...
/Brian
Actually yes :-)
You're correct on the names, but OSF/1 was a later branch off the BSD tree than Ultrix. OSF/1 was a Mach-based hybrid between BSD and SysV that never really took off; the only shipping system based on it was Tru64, though IBM did consider moving AIX to it. There was a rumor that Apple considered doing the same thing to A/UX, and PowerOpen (what was to be the native Unix on PowerPC, long before Linux and Rhapsody) was to be OSF/1-based.
Of course, none of them made it to market. And OSF/1 is now dead and buried. Oh well.
/Brian
So let's see. We have a worm. It's infected with a virus. Double your damage, double your fun... reminds me a little of flesh-eating streptococcus. Regular strep, you get a sore throat and a week or so of penicillin. Give that strep a virus, suddenly your arm starts melting.
Now what I want to know: is this train wreck a coincidence or has someone been cross-breeding?
/Brian
I just heard the sad news on IRC. Poster Anonymous Coward from Slashdot fame was found dead in his home this morning under a pile of BSD CDs and Stephen King books. I am sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his role as the vector for half-witted trolls and idiotic Beowulf and First Post posts, there's no denying his contribution to the communal bowl of hot grits. Truly a (naked and petrified) /. icon.
/Brian
By that logic, BSD isn't BSD either, as the entire AT&T codebase had been removed by 1995 (4.4BSDlite). OS X is as BSD as NeXTStep was.
/Brian
Well, I can sort of see why nobody uses it -- it looks interesting, but really strange and a long way from finished. The crufted-together development process reminds me uncomfortably of the strange beast that is Inform (www.gnelson.demon.co.uk/inform), and it really looks like it's a long way away from being ready to go.
/Brian
You are demonstrably a troll, and here's why:
-Apple's internal stuff hadn't lost credibility; we were going crazy waiting for Copland (which died of a very painful case of runaway second-system effect).
-Rhapsody did ship, as OS X Server. The only problem was that it was realized during the development process that not giving developers an easy way to convert Classic apps to OS X was Not A Good Idea, and the consumer release had to be delayed to create Carbon. Somewhere in there Gil Amelio got bounced and Steve Jobs reclaimed full control.
-Tru64 Unix is Mach-based as well. More to the point, Solaris is Unix-branded, and though Linux isn't Dennis Ritchie considers it part of the family. By that standard, if it quacks like a duck...
-The mention of Linux userfriendliness is, to put it charitably, anachronistic in the context you're talking about.
Your understanding of history is faulty, your understanding of the present is not much better, and the only intelligent thing in your entire post is describing Microsoft's sales tactics as "slamming".
(Well, that and I find the term Macastrati a hysterically funny term for people who have come over to the Mac side because of Eunuchs^h^h^h^h^h^h^hUnix, though I'll leave it up to them of the world if they wish to accept it...)
/Brian
Uh-huh. Last time I checked the US was more likely to shoot first than the Soviet Union.
Look. The simple fact is that we went into Panama to get rid of a corrupt dictator that just happened to be sitting on a waterway that controlled an insane amount of traffic; we spent all that money and arrested him on possession of tamale dough with intent to distribute. Grenada was a complete sham, and then there was El Salvador, and the mess in Nicaragua...
I return to my original point that the Reagan administration would have already moved troops into Venezuela under false pretenses very like the fall of the Mussadiq regime in Iran. Chavez -- a democratically elected president -- would have been labeled a Communist sympathizer in the press, and we'd have used that as an excuse to invade. Of course, we've got the less-than-effective war on terrorism going on (lotsa fighting, not much addressing the original cause of the terrorism) and it really doesn't look good to be supporting undemocratic governments.
As for stirring up internal unrest -- I think we did that to them, making you look like a McCarthyist goon. Not to mention a troll, as you're posting out your ass as an AC.
/Brian
SP? Suppressive Person? You lost me...
Anyway, I don't see a problem here. I would be rather curious as to how this whole thing started, as NANAE is not on my list of regular Usenet reading. But it is good that a spammer can't force an ISP to waste bandwidth on them.
/Brian
Smart move on Peru's part -- if this law passes they seem to have given some real thought to the repercussions of it.
Nice to see the Third World realizing they can take some initiative without asking "Uncle May I". Venezuela and Yugoslavia too -- their governments don't really like us much, but they're democratically elected, and Chavez in Venezuela has even come back from a possibly White House-backed (or at the very least consented) coup attempt. (He must be happy it's not 1985 -- if it was we'd already be down there with troops to "go after the Commies"...)
/Brian
I think the cleanest way to think of it is as NextStep 7.1.4. Before that, the original OS X Server (Rhapsody, to the Mac-clued) would have been 6, before that the unreleased NeXTStep 5 that would have been the next release from NeXT had they not been bought out (which most people only know from their window manager), and before that NeXTStep 4 that was the last production version under the NeXTStep name and which was what MS ripped of for the Win95 interface.
/Brian
As Jordan Hubbard becomes more and more a MacOS X posession, I just imagine Hexley vs. Beastie in a Celebrity Deathmatch.
It is sort of sad to see something like that happen, though. One could assume it was inevitable, though I suppose that would be hard without knowing what exactly he does at Apple.
/Brian
Sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY!
Down at the Cupertino speedway, the big Mac showdown! See the coolest laptop in the business get even cooler! See the amazing Unix Mac, now better than ever! See the mind-boggling G4 power of the computer everyone thinks is a text editor!
We'll sell you the entire cupholder, but you'll only need...
the edge.
/Brian
I think they're about due for a font switch anyway -- they've been using AppleMond since, oh, 1982. I'd kinda like to see them using this one more...
/Brian
At a point, though, they took out the monitor, slapped a G4 into it, and coughed up the Cube. So they did ship before; they just changed it beyond recognition. The eMac is the second go-round.
/Brian
Molar Mac?! ROTFLMAO! I've never heard that one before (probably because they were so rare).
You're right, of course -- the eMachines sub-uATX boxes are probably some of the ugliest, not to mention one particular generation of Presario microtowers from Compaq. Apple has had a few major league clunkers, though -- the worst would probably be the Quadra 8xx/PM8x00/PM9500 case, though. I bought one a while back (my current #2 Mac, in use because my #1 is out of commission) for a third of the price because it was basically in kit form, and the internal arrangement of that system is beyond ludicrous.
Plastic chassis (not that big a deal, but it looks real strange next to a good PC case). The upper drive bay (where the CD-ROM goes) isn't so much a bay as a platform. You have to remove the motherboard to install memory, a process very like major surgery. I don't know why it took Apple until the 8600/9600 to bring the fliptop design to their tower boxes. On top of that, getting the case back into place after removing it is an absurd precision operation.
/Brian
That and Apple has a habit of phoning it in design-wise on their limited-market machines. Look at a) the Tanzania-based 4400/7220, b) Artemis (the iMac's immediate all-in-one predecessor, and c) the eMate. The eMate is the only one that could be considered attractive; Artemis in particular was kinda scary-looking...
/Brian
What's bugging me...
Why did they not rerelease the Speak'n'Spell to coincide with E.T. being rereleased? It'd be pretty cheap (they could make it half as thick, on one chip), it would sell like crazy, and it would take one's mind off the fact that it is currently a little dicey to continue having dirty thoughts about Drew Barrymore.
/Brian
I want my Pixelvision.
My childhood best friend and I both owned PXL-2000 camcorders. I'd rather have one of those than one of these; the Pixelvision was easily the coolest toy Fisher-Price ever cooked up, and it's rather a shame they didn't last very long. We all used to think we were TV producers back in the day -- parodies of Star Trek and 20/20 were the big thing.
/Brian
I had an anti-Microsoft attitude long before that, believe me.
Microsoft is shaping up to be just another obliviously greedy multinational, not that that's any big surprise. Smart of someone to be looking to head this mess off.
Incidentally... somehow a side note on Venezuela seems relevant... okay, Hugo Chavez will make me pay higher prices at the gas pump, but somehow I don't really have a problem with that. I mean, how often has a Latin American coup failed so utterly?
/Brian
CompUSA sells one that works like a Mac case but looks like an HP. It's made by FMI (I have no idea who that is). I've thought of buying one, but I'm ambivalent about the quality.
Go to compusa.com and look for FMI 300-watt screwless. It's about $60 online.
/Brian